UK General Election 2024: help Ukraine win (Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, 31 May)
Upcoming solidarity events:
Tuesday 11 June, 7.0pm: Discussion meeting: “From Ukraine to Palestine, occupation is a crime” – Tuesday 11 June, 7.00 pm. Marchmont Community Centre, 62 Marchmont Street, London WC1N 1AB, and on line. Register to attend on eventbrite here or register to participate on line here. Organised by the Ukraine Information Group.
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Aydyn Zhamidulov. Photo: Russian Defense Ministry via Kommersant
Kommersant has learned that a military court has begun hearing the criminal case against Senior Lieutenant Aydyn Zhamidulov, a platoon commander in the Airborne Troops, and his subordinate, Private Alexei Dorozhkin. The Russian Investigative Committee alleges that the men kidnapped a young woman who had threatened the officer that she would tell his wife about their relationship and took her to their unit’s temporary deployment point as a Ukrainian spy. There, they stabbed the victim to death and blew up her body in an attempt to conceal their crime. Zhamidulov gained renown for writing patriotic poems during his combat training and was shown reciting them on Telegram channels.
The criminal case against Senior Lieutenant Zhamidulov and Private Dorozhkin was submitted to the Southern District Military Court, sitting in Rostov-on-Don. The men are accused of the kidnapping and brutal murder of a resident of the Luhansk People’s Republic per articles 126.1, 105.2, 30.3, 33.4, and 244.2 of the Russian Criminal Code.
In the file of the case, as investigated by military investigation units at the Russian Investigative Committee, it is reported that Zhamidulov is twenty-eight years old, a native of Kazakhstan, and lived in the Pskov Region. He has a higher education, is married, and was raising two daughters.
In January 2022, Zhamidulov signed a contract with the Defense Ministry and, in the rank of senior lieutenant, served as commander of a parachute platoon in an airborne assault regiment of the famous 76th Airborne Division.
In late 2022, a video was widely circulated in social networks and the media in which Lieutenant Zhamidulov recited a poem of his own about the those involved in the special military operation. At the end of the recital, the officer stated that his family was proud of him and was waiting for him to come home.
Dorozhkin was mobilized on 1 January 2023. Ranked as a private, he served as a senior scout in the Airborne Troops.
According to investigators, at about eight p.m. on 13 January 2023, Zhamidulov and other military men, including Dorozhkin, were drinking hard alcoholic beverages at the Rainbow Cafe in Luhansk. About half an hour later, local resident Valentina Davronova, with whom Zhamidulov had previously been in an intimate relationship, entered the cafe.
A row broke out between the senior lieutenant and the twenty-three-year-old woman. Fearing that Ms. Davronova would report their relationship to his wife, Zhamidulov decided to deal with the young woman, the case file says. He told his subordinates that he would take Ms. Davronova to her current boyfriend.
The young woman was put in the back of a KamAZ truck, and when the truck arrived at the unit, Zhamidulov tied her hands with duct tape. Dorozhkin, who went with them, was ordered by the senior lieutenant to tape Valentina’s eyes, which he did.
To avoid questions from his subordinates and make his actions look legitimate, the investigators note, Zhamidulov told them that Ms. Davronova had served in the Ukrainian army from 2018 to 2021 and had tattoos featuring Ukrainian symbols on her body. He also alleged that she was engaged in intelligence on behalf of the Ukrainian armed forces.
The young woman was taken to a soldier’s bathhouse, where Zhamidulov stabbed her about two dozen times in different parts of her body. At that time, the commander of a reconnaissance platoon combat vehicle, Sergeant Roman Pleshcheyev, entered the bathhouse (his case will be tried separately). Zhamidulov ordered him to finish off the victim. Not wanting to kill her, but fearing negative consequences on the part of the senior lieutenant, Plescheyev stabbed Ms. Davronova with his knife in the area of her left shoulder and right leg.
At 12:20 a.m., Dorozhkin entered the bathhouse, and Zhamidulov instructed him to finish what he had started. Pleshcheyev left the room and Dorozhkin killed the victim by stabbing her in the area of her heart.
Having made sure that the young woman was dead, Zhamidulov ordered his subordinates to take the body outside the temporary deployment point and detonate it with three F-1 grenades so that the deceased could not be identified and the cause of her death could not be determined.
Nevertheless, the crime was solved literally while the trail was still hot. All three defendants were detained and then remanded in custday by a military court.
The case is now in preliminary hearings, and is expected to be considered on the merits this summer. Zhamidulov’s lawyer Natalia Kokhan refused to comment on the case without vetting her answers with her client.
Aydyn Zhamidulov was mobilized from the Orenburg Region. As a civilian he worked as a welder, but now he serves in an Airborne Troops reconnaissance unit. He has a wife, two daughters, and his parents waiting for him at home.
“I was retrained in my specialty. In the short period of mobilization combat training, everything — camouflage, identifying the enemy, working with topographic maps, artillery fire — is very easy to learn,” Zhamidulov said.
All of the things he saw and his interactions with his fellow soldiers inspired Aydyn to write poems. They are plain but honest and poignant, straight from the heart.
Always our ancestors fought evil. They wrote history with blood, with the pen. They weren’t afraid to go all the way. They removed shackles, they united hearts. Now, our brothers, it’s our turn To defend our country, our home, and our people. To do justice, to open their eyes. The enemy is in deep, like a needle under the skin. Let us strike down the puppeteers, the servants of evil, Who pull the strings Of bewildered people, Of gray-haired mothers shedding tears For them, the lives of people are just a game. We must put a stop to this once and for all!
After talking to relatives in Kharkiv, once again shelled by Russia, and hearing news of the missile strike on one of Ukraine’s largest printing plants, I touch the bindings of the books on my shelves. I think about how many of them were printed in that same city, now very much on the frontlines again. This time it was not only transport and urban infrastructure that were targeted but books as well.
Factor Druk is one of the largest full-cycle printing plants in Europe. It is part of the large Factor holding, which includes, among other companies, Vivat, one of the top Ukrainian publishing houses, which has its own network of bookstores. Factor’s customers include not only Ukrainian publishers but also such global publishers as Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan.
I look at the kaleidoscope of photos—the burnt-out shop floors, the waves of pages, the scattered covers (one—oh, the bitter irony!—bears the title “The Club of the Rescued”)—and wonder how much a Russian missile costs. The internet, for example, reports that an Iskander runs for around three million dollars. Instead of “liberating” us from twenty thousand books a week before Book Arsenal, Ukraine’s most important book fair, the aggressors could, say, print themselves a few more copies of books by their own classic authors. This is not the first such strike, by the way. On 20 March of this year, Russian forces hit another printing plant in Kharkiv where many Ukrainian publishers also had their books printed.
The Factor Druk printing plant, damaged by a Russian missile strike on Kharkiv. Photo: Nicolas Cleuet/Le Pictorium/MAXPPP/dpa/picture alliance
Solidarity in response to terror
But the further away they are from Ukraine, the less people in the rest of the world understand the symbolism of these events. As the well-known Ukrainian journalist Kristina Berdynskykhwrote on her Facebook page, “Three days ago, I bought the diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko, as published by Vivat. [Vakulenko’s] shot corpse was found in a grave in a forest outside Izium in autumn 2022. The diary was found by Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina, who unearthed it in a courtyard near the house where he lived during the occupation. Amelina died [from the wounds she suffered during] the missile strike on Kramatorsk in 2023. The plant where this book was printed was destroyed by a Russian missile strike today, in 2024. ‘Volodymyr Vakulenko kept a diary during the occupation, hoping that you, the world, might be able to hear him. If you are holding this book in your hands, the writer Vakulenko has won,’ Victoria writes in the foreword. Hold books printed in Ukraine in your hands. The world will never understand all the way anyway.”
Ukrainian social networks have been overflowing with solidarity and sympathy. Thousands of people have simply gone and ordered books by their favorite publisher, Vivat, and so for a while, due to the number of orders, the publisher’s website was down, and long queues formed in some bookstores. This is probably the least that can be done now. It is the constructive fact that gathers us every day, in the midst of worries and threats, when just being is a victory in itself.
Bookshops opening in Ukraine during the war against all odds
Against all the odds, new bookshops have been opening in Ukraine amidst the war. Literary events, festivals and book fairs have been taking place. In Kyiv, one major book fair ended a month ago, another is due to start in a week, and two more are planned for the next few months. There are many reports about the growing demand for books. The other day, a bookshop manager I know commented, “People are just jumping on books. This not only furthers the culture but also helps to maintain some level of normality.”
I take one of my favorite Vivat books from the shelf—Lazarus, a novel by Svitlana Taratorina, a Ukrainian author originally from Crimea. It’s a contemporary fantasy set in an alternative magical Kyiv in the early twentieth century. The city is inhabited by both ordinary people and various “impure” creatures such as water sprites, ghouls, and werewolves. Although the book presents an interesting, intriguing and self-contained world of magical adventure, it is not hard to see its political aspect. The human beings in Lazarus come to Kyiv from the Empire. They try to impose their centralized way of life on the city, seeking to neutralizing its peculiarities and nuances, to level anything outside the imperial framework, anything “impure,” that is. This clampdown eventually and inevitably leads to an explosion. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Everything can be restored but people cannot be brought back to life
It is a day of mourning in Kharkiv. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has visited the site of the attack.
“The production facility was destroyed, and tens of thousands of books were burned by this strike. A lot of children’s literature, manuals, and textbooks…. Russian terror should never go unpunished,” he said.
Seven workers were killed at the printing plant: five women and two men who were printing children’s books that day. Twenty-one people were injured. As Elena Rybka, editor-in-chief of the publishing house, wrote, “Everything can be restored. It is impossible to bring people back to life. We sympathize with the families of the victims. We pray for the wounded. We support Ukrainian culture, because it will never be beyond politics.”
Julia Stakhivska is a Ukrainian writer who has published books of poetry and fantasy stories for children and co-edited anthologies of Ukrainian poetry.
Russia’s strike on the Factor Druk printing house killed seven workers and left 16 wounded, according to Suspilne. The company estimates that 20,000 books were destroyed, of which 40 percent were schoolbooks.
Factor Druk printed around half of Ukraine’s schoolbooks, CEO Serhii Polituchniy said in an interview with Radio Liberty.
“I don’t know how we will print tomorrow,” he added. The strike on the company’s printing facilities stands to reduce the volume of Ukraine’s publishing industry by 40 percent, according to Polituchniy’s estimates.
Three out of 10 leading publishing companies in Ukraine are located in Kharkiv which is constantly under Russian missile assault. Factor Druk did not evacuate its facilities from its location, around 40 kilometers from Russia’s border, due to the complexities and costs involved.
Polituchniy stated that most publishing professionals have chosen to stay in Kharkiv rather than move westward, where the right skills and knowledge are believed to be harder to find. “One should teach a professional for 4-5 years minimum,” Polituchniy said.
Industry leader
Factor Druk became a founder of Vivat Publishing House, one of the most prominent and popular book brands in the country, printing non-fiction and fiction books in the Ukrainian language. In 2023, Vivat became the seventh largest in Ukraine’s book publishing industry, with Hr. 191 million in revenue (almost $5 million), according to Pro-Consulting estimates provided to Kyiv Post.
Ukraine’s honey exports amounted to almost a third of the commodity’s imports to the EU in the last year, with China taking the leading position.
Vivat’s two bestsellers include Winston Churchill’s biography written by ex-UK prime minister Boris Johnson (50,000 books sold) and “Stus’s Case” – a novel about how the KGB arrested and tried Vasyl Stus, Ukraine’s poet, translator, literary critic, journalist, and an active member of the Ukrainian dissident movement. Around 120,000 copies of the book have been sold.
In addition to books, Factor Druk prints newspapers and magazines, booklets, catalogs, as well as stationery products such as calendars, notebooks and school diaries according to the company’s website.
The company also prints for other publishers, including:
Industry leaders KSD and Folio (both also Kharkiv-based)
Schoolbooks publishing company Ranok
Faith books publishing house Svichado
Children’s publishing house Zelenyy Pes
Vivat forms the majority of Factor Druk’s revenues. Overall, between 2017 and 2023, Factor Druk generated Hr. 230 million ($5.7 million) as an annual average, according to the company’s financial statements on Vkursi big data platform. The enterprise did not generate losses even during the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Ukraine’s publishing industry includes 385 publishing enterprises of different sizes, 200 of them each generating more than Hr. 1 million (£25,000) in revenues in 2023, according to Pro-Consulting’s data provided to Kyiv Post.
Well I turned around in time to see the clouds fade Running back could only make them stay Forward now I run down a winding road Try to pay back everything that I have ever owed
And when your money runs, will you buy a friend? And when your guns don’t fire, will that be the end? With no land left to burn, and nowhere left to run Where then can we stand when it’s all said and done?
Well I hear the thunder roll, I feel the cold winds blowing But you won’t find me there, ’cause I won’t go back again While you’re on smoky roads, I’ll be out in the sun Where the trees still grow, where they count by one?
Well you take from our schools to build a bigger bomb You tell us fiery lies about the course we’re on And you’ll kill all the world, and you’ll reverse the sun And which would you sell first, your soul or your gun?
But I hear the thunder roll, I feel the cold wind blowing But you won’t find me there, ’cause I won’t go back again While you’re on smoky roads I’ll be out in the sun Where the trees still grow, where they count by one?
Alexander Skobov. Photo courtesy of V. Izotov/Deutsche Welle
A new criminal case, on charges of “involvement in a terrorist community,” has been opened against former Soviet dissident and Russian political journalist Alexander Skobov, who has been detained for over a month on charges of “condoning terrorism.” This news was reported on Saturday, 18 May, on Skobov’s official Facebook account by his wife, Olga Shcheglova.
Shcheglova said that she visited her husband on 14 May in the pretrial detention center in Syktyvkar, where he had been transferred from St. Petersburg. During a conversation with him, his lawyer and local police investigators, she learned that Skobov has also been charged with “condoning terrorism” and “involvement in a terrorist community.” The dissident’s wife is convinced that these two charges stem from her husband’s affiliation with the Free Russia Forum.
According to Shcheglova, on 21 May, Skobov will be sent to the regional psychiatric hospital in Komi for a forensic psychiatric examination. Skobov himself has stated that he would not participate in the investigation and forensic expertise, and he would appear in court only if his mother were present at the hearings. Skobov’s defense has filed an appeal, which will be heard by the court on 22 May.
Skobov’s Persecution in the USSR and Russia
On 22 March 2024, Russian authorities designated Skobov a “foreign agent.” According to the Justice Ministry, he had “disseminated unreliable information” about the decisions of public officials, opposed the war, “identified the Russian Federation with a terrorist organization,” been involved in the work of an “undesirable organization,” and produced and distributed “foreign agent materials” [sic], the human rights project OVD Info reports.
In 1978, Skobov was arrested over his active involvement in the Left Opposition group and the samizdat publication of an anti-government magazine. He was later sentenced by the court to undergo treatment at a psychiatric hospital, from which he was released in the summer of 1987.
This time around, the political journalist was arrested on charges of “condoning terrorism.” Skobov was detained in St. Petersburg on 2 April 2024. In protest, the dissident refused to take with him to jail his diabetes medication and his glasses, despite his poor eyesight. According to the Telegram channel Memorial Support for Political Prisoners, the real reason for his arrest was “a [social media] post condoning the bombing of the Crimean Bridge.”
In early April, 66-year-old dissident Alexander Skobov was arrested for allegedly “justifying terrorism” in his posts online. For his friends and family members, the arrest came as no surprise.
Skobov, a long-time dissident who was made to spend seven years in a psychiatric ward after taking part in protests against the Soviet authorities in the 1970s, had published multiple posts condemning Russia’s actions in Ukraine since 2014. In March he was named a “foreign agent”, and since then people close to him said his arrest had seemed inevitable.
“He and I talked a hundred times about the fact that he would be arrested — if not today then tomorrow,” said Skobov’s friend Yuly Rybakov, a human rights activist and former deputy in the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament. “People have been imprisoned for much less.”
Skobov’s 90-year-old mother, whom he lives with and cares for, said she had been having nightmares about his arrest for months before it happened, and Rybakov recalled that Skobov himself said he “didn’t understand” why the authorities hadn’t come for him yet.
Skobov’s children, who moved abroad long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, urged their father to flee the country when they saw him in Istanbul in early March. Other friends have also tried to convince him to leave and avoid arrest, citing his many health issues, including severe diabetes, hepatitis C, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and near blindness.
But, Rybakov said, Skobov was resolute, telling him that he “wanted to be part of his own judicial process” when he was inevitably arrested.
Rybakov said that Skobov had been “driven to despair” by what had been happening in Russia in recent years and “felt that someone had to be radical”.
Another friend, Mikhail Sedunov, said that trying to convince Skobov to change his course of action was like “grabbing the wing of a plane that was already accelerating down the runway”.
On 2 April, masked policemen arrived at Rybakov’s flat, where Skobov had been staying. When Rybakov left to take the dog for a walk, the police reportedly entered the property, threw Skobov to the ground, twisted his arms and handcuffed him. According to Rybakov, Skobov “defiantly” refused to take either warm clothing, his diabetes medication, or his glasses with him, intending these gestures as an “act of protest”.
Skobov’s wife, Olga Shcheglova, managed to buy him replacement medication and glasses, which she brought to him ahead of his interrogation by Russia’s Investigative Committee. But Skobov refused to accept them — a reaction Shcheglova said she had “expected” from her husband.
Resistance to the authorities and a fight for justice had defined Skobov’s life for more than four decades. His first foray into political activism was in 1976, when he and other university students in St. Petersburg scattered leaflets calling for the “establishment of true humane socialism” and the “overthrow of the tyranny of officials” ahead of a meeting of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The students were expelled from university and brought before a court, and some, like Skobov, were then sentenced to compulsory treatment in psychiatric hospitals because, according to Rybakov, it was believed that “only crazy people could dislike the Soviet regime”.
Skobov’s radical spirit remained unquelled when he was finally released from hospital in 1981, however, and he immediately joined the Free Inter-Professional Association of Workers, a dissident group that led the first attempt to create an independent trade union in the USSR. In 1982 he was arrested for his involvement with the group and sent back to hospital, where he spent another three years.
In the early 1990s Skobov taught history at a secondary school for gifted students, writing and publishing his own award-winning textbooks. But later in the decade political activism again became the focal point of his life as he took part in protests against the Chechen wars.
When Russia annexed Ukraine in 2014, Skobov took to social media to rail against the regime, openly supporting Ukraine and condemning Russia’s military action. The same year, two unidentified men armed with knives attacked him outside his home in what his friends and family members say they are sure was retribution for his criticism of the regime.
Even this did not deter him, however, and his friends said his statements opposing Putin’s rule became “even sharper, more unrestrained, and more radical”. Speaking last year at the Free Russia Forum, an opposition conference held biannually in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, Skobov condemned the regime more harshly than any of the other attendees, despite being one of the only participants still living in Russia.
Another friend of Skobov, Nikita Yeliseyev, said he doubted Skobov would survive the 7.5-year sentence that he is almost certain to receive.
“He is an old man,” Yeliseyev said. “And he has a number of very serious illnesses.”
Sedunov said all of Skobov’s actions stemmed from a desire to “struggle, as vigorously as possible, against the obvious evil represented by the current Russian government”.
“This is the way he was brought up: he wanted to fight evil any way he could. And this was the only way left,” Sedunov said.
Aleksandr Skobov has been a thorn in the side of authoritarian governments for more than four decades, from the Soviet era to President Vladimir Putin’s long rule. And now, in pretrial detention in St. Petersburg and facing prison, he is in no mood for compromise.
“On principle I refuse to comply with fascist laws,” he told RFE/RL late last month, shortly after the Russian government designated him a “foreign agent” on March 22. “I don’t intend to get into debates with the government. I will not try to prove my innocence. I will not label my writings, and I will not write any financial reports for them.”
“A criminal case could be launched at any moment,” he concluded.
He was right: On April 3, the 66-year-old was arrested and charged with “justifying terrorism” for a social-media post about the Ukrainian attacks that damaged the Crimea Bridge that links Russia with the Ukrainian region of Crimea, which Moscow occupied in 2014. The following day, a St. Petersburg court ordered Skobov held in pretrial detention for at least two months.
“If you take any of my articles or YouTube videos, you can find a whole bouquet of possible charges,” Skobov said in the March 31 interview. “Discrediting the army. Inciting hatred and enmity. Justifying terrorism. The rehabilitation of Nazism. I directly equate the actions of the Stalin regime with those of Hitler’s during World War II.”
Another reason for Skobov’s prosecution, his supporters believe, is his leadership role in the Free Russia Forum, a group of mostly exiled opposition figures founded by former world chess champion Garry Kasparov and activist Ivan Tyutrin in 2016 that has been declared “undesirable” in Russia. If he is charged with participation in an “undesirable” organization, he could face up to six years in prison.
“I am a member of the forum’s council, and I regularly participate in its broadcasts,” Skobov told RFE/RL. “I help write its statements and official pronouncements. Several of them I have written myself. I am actively involved, and I do not intend to stop.”
Skobov said he was drawn to the group because “it was the only opposition organization that categorically rejected the idea of the peaceful transformation of Putin’s dictatorship toward democracy using the procedure established by that dictatorship.”
“It was the only organization that, beginning with the annexation of Crimea, unambiguously stood by Ukraine as a victim of aggression,” he added. “We try to help the Ukrainian Army and the Russian volunteer formations that are fighting with them.”
Writing on Facebook after Skobov’s arrest, writer and critic Mikhail Berg said Skobov suffered from “an unbearable fear of being afraid.”
“And that is why he chooses the most painful forms of criticizing the authorities,” he wrote. “He shouts even though the authorities have long been destroying people for whispering or even for just opening their mouths.”
Parallel Lives
Born in Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was called then, in 1957, Skobov participated in his first anti-government protest when he was 19. He and other members of an underground organization threw about 100 flyers calling for “humanistic socialism” from the roof of a downtown building on the eve of the 25th congress of the Soviet Communist Party. Several of the protesters were kicked out of their universities, but Skobov — a first-year history student at Leningrad State University — got off with a disciplinary meeting of the Komsomol youth group.
In October 1978, he was arrested for publishing an underground, anti-government magazine called Perspectives. He spent half a year in a KGB prison before being sentenced to forced psychiatric treatment.
“In the late 1970s and early 1980s, political prisoners in Soviet psychiatric hospitals were rarely forcibly medicated, although there were such cases, of course,” Skobov said. “But I was treated more or less OK. Most of the doctors that I encountered tried to avoid playing the role of executioners or stranglers.”
He spent three years in confinement.
In 1982, he was again sentenced to psychiatric treatment, this time for a samizdat article he wrote defending Chile’s former socialist president, Salvador Allende, who died in unclear circumstances in 1973, and criticizing the rightist dictator General Augusto Pinochet. That article was deemed “anti-Soviet propaganda.”
This time, Skobov spent five years in the hospital before being released in the summer of 1987 during the initial phase of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalization campaign.
In many ways, Skobov and Putin led parallel lives during this period. Putin was born in Leningrad almost exactly five years before Skobov and studied at Leningrad State University just before him. But as Skobov became drawn into a life of opposition to authoritarianism, Putin joined the KGB secret police.
The president’s official biography insists that Putin always worked for the KGB’s First Directorate, which carried out counterintelligence operations. However, rumors have persisted for years that he worked for some time in the Fifth Directorate, which was responsible for suppressing internal dissent and prosecuting political dissidents. At the time, a senior figure in that department was Viktor Cherkesov, a longtime member of Putin’s inner circle who served as his deputy when he headed the Federal Security Service — the KGB successor organization — in the 1990s and who died in 2022.
In 2022, journalist and researcher Konstantin Sholmov published a photograph of a KGB archival document from 1976 that he said was on display at the Political History Museum in St. Petersburg. The document, a protocol of a search of the residence of Leningrad artist and dissident Oleg Volkov, named “Lieutenant Putin” as one of the officers carrying out the search.
In 2013, a series of photographs emerged showing a 1989 Leningrad protest during which KGB operatives roughly detained dissident Valery Terekhov. One of the men in the photograph resembles Putin. The Kremlin later denied that the man was Putin, saying the future president had already been sent to East Germany by 1989.
Prominent human rights activist Aleksandr Cherkasov of the banned rights group Memorial told the news outlet Agentstvo earlier this month that he believes Putin was involved in the investigation of Skobov. He said Skobov had told him Putin staked out his Leningrad apartment in November 1982 when prominent dissidents gathered to celebrate Skobov’s birthday.
Despite the danger growing around him after he was designated a “foreign agent,” Skobov refused to consider emigration.
“I’m not going to quit,” he said.
“Today anyone in Russia who disagrees with Putin’s Nazi regime is taking a risk,” he added, “even if he doesn’t really stick out or act publicly. Since the regime has already made the transformation from ‘hybrid totalitarian’ to totalitarian, it demands not just silence from its loyal subjects, but active participation. And even avoidance can be dangerous.”
Opposition leader Aleksei Navalny’s suspicious death in prison on February 16 was “to be expected,” Skobov said.
“Navalny constantly laughed in [Putin’s] face, and a dictator cannot stand that,” he added. “Unfortunately, I don’t think it will be the last death of a political prisoner in Putin’s Russia.”
Security camera footage shows a bus in St. Petersburg, Russia, veering across the road and off a bridge into the Moika River. At least three people were killed, with several others in serious condition in hospital.
While the international far right was busy meeting in Washington, D.C., for the CPAC 2024 conference in late February, on the other side of the world, a grab bag of “anti-Western” groups, including a handful of far-right leaders from Europe, North America, and South America, gathered in the Lomonosov innovation cluster in Moscow for two conferences held in parallel. One was the Multipolarity Forum (Форум многополярности) and the other, the Second Congress of the International Russophile Movement (Второй конгресс Международного движения русофилов, МДР).
The two meetings, which centered on support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, attacking the LGBTQ+ community, opposition to “Western hegemony,” and opposition to the “russophobia” of the West, brought together an odd assortment of leaders. There were representatives from the Global South, National Bolsheviks, acolytes of far right Russian ideologue Alexander Dugin, European neo-fascists, revolutionary leftists, and leaders of various religious denominations. All in all, the gathering included more than 300 representatives from 130 countries.
While Moscow has hosted largeconferences attended by significant far-right groups in the past, these two events mark a shift towards official institutional support as high-ranking government officials officially sanctioned the gathering. Present were two members of Putin’s cabinet, Maria Zakharova, the director of the information and press department of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, who presented opening remarks from Putin.
Other foreign state officials were invited to the congress as well. They included Darko Mladić, the son of General Ratko Mladić, convicted war criminal for genocide and former general of the Republika Srpska (RS), Zhang Weiwei, an ideologue for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Syrian diploma and current ambassador to Russia Bashar Al Jaafari, former Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic Jan Czarnogursky, and South African MP for the African National Congress (ANC) and grandson of Nelson Mandela, Zwelivelile “Mandla” Mandela. Pierre de Gaulle, the grandson of former French President Charles de Gaulle, who has expressed pro-Russian sympathies throughout the war, noted his grandfather’s alleged support for relations with Russia.
“Russophobia,” the “racism” of the West, and the “canceling of Russia” were common themes at the event. Tsargrad TV founder Konstantin Malofeev claimed that the current wave of alleged xenophobia and racism against Russians was comparable to what happened in Nazi Germany. Going further, he underlined that, “we understand that this is the hatred of the globalist elite, not the people.” However, at times, some speakers revealed that the “russophobia” they were referring to was not simply a perceived xenophobia towards Russians, but the West’s insistence that LGBTQ+ people simply not be discriminated against. In fact, one of the three thematic sections for the International Russophile Movement Congress included a section on “traditional values.” In his speech, Alexander Dugin mentioned the following:
“The West has racistly and imperialistically identified itself with humanity. There was a time when Britain claimed all seas and oceans as its own. Western civilisation declared all of humanity its property — primarily its consciousness. This led to the formation of a unipolar world. In this world, there are only Western values. Only one political system — liberal democracy. Only one economic model — neoliberal capitalism. Only one culture — postmodernism. Only one conception of genders and family — LGBT. Only one version of development — technological perfection up to post-humanism and the complete displacement of humanity by AI and cyborgs.”
Dugin, the leader of the International Eurasian Movement (Международная евразийская движения, MED), and theorist of “Eurasianism,” and the neo-fascist “Fourth Political Theory” which aims to unite far right and far left groups around the world to destabilize Western democracies, was a key speaker at the event. He received widespread attention from conference attendees and Russian propaganda outlets RT, Sputnik, and Tsargrad. Other followers of the “Fourth Political theory” present at the conference included Raphael Machado, leader of the far right Brazilian group Nova Resistência (New Resistance), which the U.S. State Department recently classified as a source of “Pro-Kremlin Disinformation” in Brazil. According to Machado, the conferences, which were first organized in 2023, are the brainchild of he and Dugin, with support from the Thinkers Forum in China and the International Movement of Russophiles. Following the 2023 conferences, Machado was named the Latin American coordinator for the event. During Machado’s trip to Moscow, he met with many of the speakers, including Maria Zakharova, the President of the Eurasian Youth Union (Евразийский союз молодежи) chapter in Russia, Pavel Kiselev, and Leonid Savin, the longtime editor of Dugin’s website Geopolitika.ru.
Another individual with whom Machado had contact while on his trip was a member of the ultranationalist Two-Headed Eaglemovement (Всероссийский съезд общества “Двуглавый Орел”), led by Malofeev, and which Machado claims has a formal partnership with Nova Resistência and is currently fighting in Ukraine. The Two-Headed Eagle movement was created by Malofeev in 2017 with the objective of supporting Putin, ridding the country of secularism and returning the Orthodox monarchy to the country, as well as the demolition of Lenin’s mausoleum.
Malofeev, the director of Russian Christian nationalist and conspiracist media platform Tsargrad (Царьград), and wealthy financier of anti-LGBTQ+ causes around the world, who has paid millions of dollars to separatists in the Donbass region of Ukraine, was another star speaker. During his speech, he made the following comments directed at the LGBTQ+ community:
“I think everyone in this room is well aware that the World Health Organization was created with Rockefeller money, and now its main sponsor is the Bill Gates Foundation. Therefore, transnational corporations and international organizations have long merged and serve the interests of the globalist elite. WHO recently adopted the International Classification of Diseases No. 11 (ICD-11), which excluded perversion from mental disorders and pedophilia ceased to be a disease, but became just a disorder. This is not the imposition of new social norms, but rather it is the abandonment of God and the embodiment of Satanism.”
Formally, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the head of the International Movement of Russophiles (MDR) Nikolai Malinov, a former Bulgarian politician who was once accused of spying for Russia and sanctioned by the United States, organized the events. In practice, however, it is understood that Malofeev was the primary financier of the congresses.
Italian far right leader Roberto Fiore, acting as a representative on behalf of his neo-fascist political party Forza Nuova (New Force, FN) and the EU parliamentary far-right coalition Alliance for Peace and Freedom (APF), made up of the Die Heimat (DH), Parti Nationaliste Français (PNF), Democracia Nacional (DN) and other far-right parties, was also an invited attendee of the conferences. Fiore presented a proposal for “a Russian intervention of 50 billion euros to regenerate the agriculture of our territory and consequently its social fabric, eroded by years of capitalism and policies distant from the earth.” This would apparently “allow Italy to gradually move away from the diabolical Western world that is leading our country to the abyss.”
Another attendee was Belgian Kris Roman, a Russian propagandist with ties to both Russian intelligence, and various groups on the international far right. Roman, who considers himself a “reformed racist,” has a history steeped in Nazism and white supremacist politics, which later led him to make connections with the Russian far right in the early 2000s and build bridges with Russians over the years through his organization Euro-Rus. During the event, Roman met with Maria Zakharova. Other far-right attendees included Zmago Jelinčič Plemeniti, the leader of the far right, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-Roma party Slovenska Nacionalna Stranka (Slovenian National Party, SNS), Mitsuhiro Kimura, the leader of the Japanese ultranationalist and anti-American group Issuikai (一水会), and Kemi Seba, a French-Beninese, pro-Russian activist against French colonialism in Africa with a history of holdingstronglyantisemiticbeliefs.
A number of pro-Russian journalists, who frequently speak on air on Russian propaganda channels such as RT and Sputnik, were present for the event. Brazilian journalist for the Asia TimesPepe Escobar, who commonly appears on Russian media channels, was invited to speak alongside Maria Zakharova. Another attendee was conspiracist and Syrian dictator Bashar Assad propagandist Maram Susli, AKA “Syrian Girl,” known for her television appearances on Russia Today (Россия Сегодня, RT) and the American conspiracy outfit Infowars, who has ties to white nationalist identitarian groups in Austria and the US. Other influencers present at the conferences were Peruvian war correspondent and Russian propagandistCarlos Mamani, American MMA fighter and RT host Jeff Monson, and Russian-American television host for Channel One Russia (Первый канал) Dimitri K. Simes. A representative from the far right conspiracist website Counterspin New Zealand was present to cover the event.
A cohort of representatives from religious movements were invited to the conference, including the Archbishop Savva of Zelenograd, the Catholic Cardinal Viganò, Sheikh Iman Hussein, and Archpriest Tkachev. The Duginist outlet Geopolitika’s summary of the event described their speeches as follows:
“In the speeches of Cardinal Viganò and Archpriest Tkachev, a verdict was made on the hegemony of Western elites, a condemnation of their diabolical roots and the closed club of Satan worshipers. They openly criticized the hatred of traditional biblical man, dotting the i’s and calling a spade a spade.”
The Portuguese commentator Alexandre Guerreiro, was also present to give a speech on multipolarity. Guerreiro was previously named in a report by Portuguese news outlet Sábado to be a part of the “far-right network spreading Russian propaganda in Portugal,” and has appeared several times on the podcast of Nova Resistência. From Poland, Tomasz Jankowski, previously the general secretary of the pro-RussianZmiana political party (Change), and the magazineMyśl Polska, made an appearance. CIA veteran Larry Johnson was another popular guest who claimed in his speech that the United States had become a country like the Soviet Union that “restricted free speech, jailed political opponents, and had elderly leaders.”
Finally, testifying to the Red-Brown alliance (between far left, far right, and nationalist groups) that the Russian government has done so much to help foster in recent years, members of the traditional radical left also sent representatives to the conferences. Chief amongst them was Jesus Salazar Velásquez, the Venezuelan ambassador to Russia who voiced his support for “Russia and the country’s fight for a just world without the hegemony of the ‘collective West.’” From the U.S., the pro-Russian communist Haz Al-Din, and the German communistLiane Kilinc, president of the “Peace Bridge – War Victims Aid,” met with other pro-Russian influencers outside of the event. Two attendees coming from Latin America, Elier Ramírez Cañedo, the Deputy director of the Fidel Castro Ruz Center, and the Argentinian sociologist Atilio Boron, were in attendance. Jackson Hinkle the “MAGA Communist” from the United States, was another attendee who met with many of the speakers including Alexander Dugin, Maria Zakharova, Sergey Lavrov, and Kris Roman.
Crimean pensioner Maria Zamyrailo-Levytska has been jailed for five days and fined 35 thousand roubles over ‘liked’ posts on the social network Odnoklassniki, including one containing the Ukrainian trident. The 64-year-old is one of a huge number of Ukrainian men and women who have been ‘denounced’ by so-called ‘Crimean SMERSH’ vigilantes working closely with the Russian occupation enforcement bodies to hunt down those expressing pro-Ukrainian views or opposition to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
Judging by the material shown on the Crimean SMERSH Telegram channel, Zamyrailo-Levytska may well have only ‘liked’ the posts of others, with this on Odnoklassniki meaning that the posts appear on her page also. All of the posts which Crimean SMERSH and the Russian occupation regime found ‘incriminating’ demonstrate support for Ukraine, as well as gratitude and deep respect for Ukraine’s defenders.
The occupation enforcement bodies came up with two charges. She was accused of ‘discrediting’ the Russian armed forces, under Article 20.3.3 of Russia’s code of administrative offences. This was one of four charges hastily added to Russian legislation following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and it is standardly used in occupied Crimea to prosecute for Ukrainian patriotic songs, the Ukrainian flag or for expressing opposition to the war. She was, however, also charged under Article 20.3 § 1 because of the Ukrainian Trident on posts. Although the ‘court press service’ typically reported this as being a conviction for “publicly demonstrating Nazi symbols”, it went on to explain that it was, in fact, because it was considered to be a symbol of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, one of many Ukrainian organizations banned in Russia and in parts of Ukraine while they remain under Russian occupation. There were, seemingly, two separate ‘hearings’ on 7 May 2024, with both under ‘judge’ Georgy Davidovich Tsertsvadze from the occupation ‘Kirovske district court’. It is likely that she received the five-day term of imprisonment over the Trident, and the 35-thousand rouble fine over posts claimed to ‘discredit’ the invading country’s armed forces.
‘Crimean SMERSH’ do not appear to have extracted one of their standard videoed ‘confessions’ which are normally shot in occupation ‘police’ offices. It is clear from the part of the ‘court’ hearing that Crimean SMERSH, or the latter’s most notorious collaborator Aleksandr Talipov, posted, that Zamyrailo-Levytska was clearly terrorized, and can be seen ‘admitting guilt’ and promising not to do it again.
The original SMERSH was active in the Soviet Union during World War II and immediately afterwards. While supposedly created to hunt down those working for the Nazis, it is most notorious for having targeted opponents of the communist regime. The term SMERSH was, apparently, coined by Joseph Stalin as an abbreviation for ‘death to spies’. As in Stalin’s USSR, the victims of the modern day ‘Crimean SMERSH’ are those who oppose the current occupation regime. Russia originally used ‘videoed confessions’ as part of its terror in Chechnya, however the Russian human rights monitors OVD.info reported in June 2023 that two thirds of these alleged ‘confessions’ now come from occupied Crimea.
If, in occupied Crimea, Talipov & Co. carry out their denunciations and use torture or terror to extract ‘confessions’ in obvious, yet not officially stated collaboration with the occupation authorities, that may well be about to change.
In December 2023, Russian Duma deputy Andrei Gurulev, a lieutenant general on the Duma defence committee, announced the creation of SMERSH in occupied parts of Ukraine. The aim of SMERSH, he claimed, was “to fight saboteurs and spies” and he called for SMERSH to be revived throughout Russia. While the security service is working all out, he wrote, they could miss something, and claimed that there are internal enemies acting against Russia’s interests “with the help of Western security services”. Although both Russian-installed Crimean leader Sergei Aksyonov and Yan Gagin from the Russian proxy ‘Donetsk people’s republic’ were cited as having called for such units, this was seemingly the first time that a Russian official said that SMERSH was already functioning in occupied parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts.
The Russian capture of Avdiivka and its military’s slow subsequent advance this spring has come at the cost of thousands of deaths of its own servicemen, to say nothing of Ukrainian losses. Since the summer of 2022, Russian commanders have repeatedly sent their soldiers on suicidal assaults, essentially using them as cannon fodder. Deprived of proper support, sapped of motivation, denied medical aid, and left with no route of retreat that does not involve the high risk of being shot by their own side, Russian soldiers are dying in droves for every kilometer of uninhabitable territory “liberated” by Kremlin forces.
Survivors of these “meat grinder” assaults supplied The Insider with harrowing accounts. They took cover behind the corpses of their former comrades during shelling. They were tasked with collecting the shredded remains of blown apart bodies. They were trapped in trenches for days with no food, water, ammunition, or hope of evacuation.
The Russian army’s meagre successes in Ukraine – such as taking the ruined town of Avdiivka, at horrendous human cost – have produced a new round of western politicians’ statements and commentators’ articles about possible peace negotiations.
Hopes are not high, because the Kremlin shows no appetite for such talks. Its actions, such as nightly bombing of civilians and civilian infrastructure, speak louder than political and diplomatic words on all sides.
The desire and hope for peace is widely shared, and I share it too. How can it be achieved?
Among “left” writers, the “campists” and one-sided “anti-imperialists”, who deny Ukraine’s right to resist Russian aggression, say that peace talks could start now … if only the western powers did not stand in the way. (By “campism”, I mean the view that the world is divided simplistically between a western imperialist camp dominated by the US, and another camp comprising China, Russia and other countries, in which some progressive potential resides.)
Mariupol, after the siege. Photo: ADifferentMan / Creative Commons
The “campist” case is made by literally ignoring what is actually going on in Ukraine, and Russia, and focusing – often exclusively – on the political and diplomatic shenanigans in western countries.
In this blog post I will look at seven recent articles by “campist” writers. All of them call for peace talks; and all claim that the main obstacle is the western powers.
I will cover (1) the selection of subject matter by these authors; (2) what little they actually say about peace negotiations; and (3) why the claim that the western powers sabotaged peace talks in April 2022 is less convincing than they believe it to be.
None of the seven articles says one word about Russia’s political system, its politicians’ nationalist rhetoric or its war economy, which are among the central causes of the war. Not a word. Only one of the articles (Alexander Hill’s) attempts to assess Russian war aims; one more (Andrew Murray’s) makes glancing reference to these.
Only one of the articles (Hill’s, again) touches on what Ukrainian people are thinking or doing. None of the other six articles says a word about this, despite Ukrainian popular resistance being, by any measure, a key factor in the war.
Only one of the articles (Hill’s, again) says much about what has happened on the battlefield. One more (Branko Marcetic in Jacobin) has one paragraph on Ukrainian battlefield losses, but no mention of Russian losses. Two more (Murray’s, and Wojcik and Atkins’s) have very brief references to this.
While saying almost nothing about what is going on in Ukraine, or Russia, all seven articles discuss statements bywestern politicians, diplomats and/or military leaders. At length.
Five of the articles (by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies, by Hill, by Wojcik and Atkins, and two by Marcetic) focus on a peace deal that was supposedly on the table in April 2022, and claim that western politicians, who twisted president Zelensky’s arm, wrecked it (see last section). On the other hand, only two of the articles (Hill and Murray) make any suggestion about what peace talks might look like (see next section).
Dear readers, I can hear you say: but you have just picked seven articles at random. No. It’s a fair sample. I searched the largest-circulation English language “left” web sites; these were the most visible articles by don’t-support-Ukrainian-resistance writers.
The key point is that none of these writers mention how the Kremlin works. No reference to Vladimir Putin’s attitude to the world, or whether it has changed. No assessment of the deranged nationalist, even genocidal, rants about Ukraine by him, his close colleagues and high-profile Russian TV personalities. No mention of whether Russia can be considered an imperialist power or not. Not a word about the way that its invasion of Ukraine not only breached international agreements and laws, but also offends the principle of nations’ right to self-determination that socialists have held dear since the 19th century.
It is telling, too, that these “campist” writers have no interest in what Ukrainian people say or do. Nor Russian people. They don’t pretend to look at the interaction of social, political and economic forces. They are concerned largely – some of them, exclusively – with the western elite. They see themselves as its opposite and its nemesis. Russian or Ukrainian soldiers, Russian anti-war protesters, Ukrainian trade unionists on the front line, Ukrainian refugees – these are bit part players in a drama played out in Washington, London and Berlin.
The result is a fantasy world that bears only indirect relation to reality.
When I say “campists”, I mean a very narrow group among “left” writers, who embrace a fake “anti-imperialism”, historically descended from 20th century Stalinism.
They do not speak for the labour movement more broadly, or for the millions of people in western countries who think of themselves as “left wing”, or who vote for Social Democratic parties. These are powerful forces for change. But the “campist” influence is dangerous and divisive.
Of course many journalists in the mainstream press also focus exclusively on this elite world of diplomats and politicians. But they usually see themselves as part of it. The “campists” sees themselves in opposition – but only to the western powers, the US above all. For them, the American empire is the only empire worth fighting.
Whether Russia might have traits of empire, whether China might seek to construct some sort of empire, whether bloodthirsty dictators like Bashar al-Assad are tied to imperial interests – all this is excluded from the conversation. Real struggles that confront the American empire, such as the Palestinians’, are welcomed; those that face other enemies, such as Ukrainians resisting Putin, or Syrians and Palestinians resisting Assad, are shunned.
What could peace negotiations look like
Andrew Murray writes:
Moving from ceasefire to a permanent peace will of course be challenging. Russia will need to accept a sovereign and independent Ukrainian state, and Ukraine will have to accept remaining outside NATO and self-determination for minorities within its borders.
The Stop the War coalition, in which Murray is a leading voice, sets out its policies in the form of calls for UK government action. So it’s fair to assume that this, too, is a call for the UK government to take a particular stance – in this case, the most pro-Russian stance possible. Going through the points in turn:
1. “Russia will need to accept a sovereign and independent Ukrainian state” is meaningless. It did so, in the Belovezha accords that dissolved the Soviet Union (1991), and the Budapest memorandum under which Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons (1994). Since 2014 Russia has been pounding Ukraine militarily, in breach of those agreements. Any attempts to stop the fighting in Ukraine diplomatically would have to start by recognising that reality – which is why a peace treaty, as opposed to a ceasefire or simply “freezing” the conflict, is extremely unlikely.
2. “Ukraine will have to accept remaining outside NATO” is essentially a demand for NATO to allow Russia to decide which states join (why no objection to Finland and Sweden?!). The UK government may indeed be cynical enough to take such a position, but why should the labour movement encourage it to do so? What sort of solidarity is that with the Ukrainian population – which before 2014 was in its vast majority opposed to NATO membership, but has largely come to see it as the only security arrangement that can prevent their country being invaded again and again?
President Zelensky in Bucha, April 2022
3. “Self-determination for minorities within its [Ukraine’s] borders.” This is a distortion of the principle of the right of nations to self-determination, historically embraced by socialists. Self-determination includes the right to secession. (It is relevant that Russia killed tens of thousands of people in Chechnya in the early 2000s, to help ensure that this right would not be exercised.)
From 2014, the extreme right in Russia called for the establishment of a new state, “Novorossiya”, in south-eastern Ukraine, effectively a demand for “self-determination” of Russian people there – but the Kremlin refused to support this. Moscow was aware that the vast majority of Russian-speaking Ukrainians neither wanted “self-determination” nor regarded themselves as Russian. The exception was Crimea, where a referendum on annexation by Russia (a strange type of “self-determination”) was held under military occupation.
Long before 2014, there had been support in eastern Ukraine for greater autonomy within the Ukrainian state, and distrust of Ukrainian nationalist politicians in Kyiv. The Kremlin did its best to whip up divisions among Ukrainians on this basis. It engaged in a long campaign of disinformation, claiming to support the rights of Russian speakers in Ukraine. (I wrote about this e.g. here.) But on a diplomatic level, until 2022, the Kremlin pretended that the Russian army was not present in Ukraine, although it was, and left the status of the Luhansk and Donetsk “republics” vague. All this changed in 2022, when the Kremlin recognised the “republics” and invaded Ukraine.
In 2022, people in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhyia voted – sometimes literally looking down the barrel of a soldier’s gun, and always under the shadow of the biggest military operation in mainland Europe since world war two – on accession to the Russian federation. This is the Kremlin’s version of “self-determination for minorities within Ukraine’s borders”. The Stop the War coalition has been conspicuous in its failure to denounce this violent abomination.
Why, then, demand that the UK government raise the issue of “self-determination for minorities” in peace talks? Andrew Murray can not believe there is the least chance of them doing so. The point is to preserve the fantasy world in which “campism” lives, in which Russian imperialism, Russian assaults on democratic rights and the Kremlin’s distortion of democratic principles for its political ends do not exist.
Alexander Hill writes:
The key outcome [of peace talks] will be the separation of the Russian-dominated Donbass and Crimea from the remainder of Ukraine – something that will hopefully be the cornerstone of a lasting peace in the region.
Although Hill clearly favours a ceasefire, and the Stop the War coalition opposed the Russian invasion in 2022, that is not what is under discussion here. Hill is envisaging the outcome of peace negotiations. Why endorse the imperial power’s demands in this way? Where is the evidence that, if these demands are met, “lasting peace” will ensue? How is this in the labour movement’s interests or the interests of international solidarity?
What happened in April 2022
The idea that peace talks have been blocked solely by the western powers – rather than by Russia’s war strategy – has been repeated over and over again by the “campists” over the past two years. They claim, in particular, that a deal was on the table in Istanbul in April 2022, that Ukraine was ready to sign, but that Boris Johnson, then UK premier, visited Kyiv and persuaded president Zelensky not to do so.
This version of events was demolished by Volodymyr Artiukh and Taras Fedirko in October 2022. They showed that the single source for the claim, a report in Ukrainska Pravda, had been misinterpreted, and that a mass of evidence suggested that the talks failed due to Ukrainian and Russian political factors, and the dynamics of military operations. Commentators who focus on “a magic turning point when everything could have gone otherwise” ignore that “in Russia’s repertoire, diplomacy has consistently been subordinated to the use of force”, they wrote. I urge readers to read this thoughtful, rounded argument.
Recently, accounts of the Istanbul talks have surfaced from people who were involved: the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, and the Ukrainian politicians Davyd Arakhamia and Oleksiy Arestovich. The “campists” have cherry-picked lines from these sources to revive their narrative.
Branko Marcetic of Jacobin claimed that an interview given in July last year by Bennett, who had been in touch with the Russian and Ukrainian governments, was a “bombshell”. Bennett said that in April 2022 there had been “a good chance of reaching a ceasefire”, and when asked “had they [who?] not curbed it”, “he replied with a nod”.
While it is unclear what that nod meant, and who “they” referred to, Bennett’s statement that the April deal was killed off by the revelation of the Russian army’s massacre of civilians at Bucha, outside Kyiv, is unequivocal. In Marcetic’s own words:
“Once that [Bucha] happened, I [Bennett] said, ‘It’s over,’” he recounts. Bennett pointed to the potential for such an atrocity to emerge and derail the political prospects for peace in Ukraine as proof of the importance of making haste on negotiations at the time. The Pravda report likewise pointed to Johnson’s visit as only one “obstacle” to peace, with the discovery of the Bucha killings the other.
Marcetic, writing in early August last year, chose not to look more widely at the circumstances in which Bennett gave his interview. Shortly beforehand, in June, the leaders of Comoros, Senegal, South Africa and other African nations had met with both Zelensky and Putin to propose peace talks. Putin had told them that one of their proposed starting-points for talks – accepting Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders – was unacceptable. (During this meeting, Putin held up what he claimed was the draft of the April agreement, although this has not been published before or since.)
A proper account of the failure of peace initiatives would mention not only the western powers, who of course influence decision-making in Kyiv (in recent months increasingly to constrain the war effort), but also Russia’s real intentions. Marcetic ignores that.
In November last year, Wojcik and Atkins sculpted another piece of evidence that Boris Johnson, and the western powers, were the obstacle to peace, from an interview with Davyd Arakhamia, one of the leaders of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party. They quoted Arakhamia reflecting on the Istanbul talks as follows:
“[The Russians] were ready to end the war if we accepted neutrality like Finland once did. And we were ready to make a commitment that we would not join NATO. When we returned from Istanbul, [then-British Prime Minister] Boris Johnson came to Kiev and said: ‘Do not sign anything with them at all; just go to war,’” Arakhamia said.
Now let’s look at what Arakhamia actually said, as reported by the Russian opposition web site, Meduza. Wojcik and Atkins have cut out a key passage, after the words “would not join NATO”. I have put it back, in bold type.
“They actually hoped until nearly the last moment that they could press us into signing this agreement, adopting neutrality. That was their biggest priority. They were willing to end the war if we took on neutrality, like Finland once did, and gave assurances that we wouldn’t join NATO. That was essentially the main point. Everything else was cosmetic and political embellishments about ‘denazification’, the Russian-speaking population, blah blah blah,” Arakhamia said.
When asked why Ukraine didn’t agree to Russia’s terms, Arakhamia was resolute:
First of all, to agree to this point, we would have to change the [Ukrainian] Constitution. Our path to NATO is written into the Constitution. Second of all, we did not and still do not trust the Russians to keep their word. This would only have been possible if we had security guarantees. We couldn’t sign something, walk away, everyone would breathe a sigh of relief, and then [Russia] would invade, only more prepared this time — because the first time they invaded, they were actually unprepared for us to resist so much. So we could only work [with them] if we were 100 percent confident that this wouldn’t happen a second time. And we don’t have that confidence.
Moreover, when we returned from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to Kyiv and said that we wouldn’t sign anything with them at all, and that we should just fight.
Oh dear! The really important part – that Ukraine needed guarantees that Russia would not once again break its word and invade – went missing!!
This reminds me of Soviet censors who, when a Communist party leader fell out of favour, would cut the unhappy has-been out of official photos. Snip snip snip.
Arakhamia’s statement, in full, suggests that, with Russia’s brutal invasion at its height, the Ukrainian side needed a more substantial security guarantee than Putin’s piece of paper.
Of course, what Arakhamia said should be treated with scepticism, as should all statements from all politicians. But it shouldn’t have vital parts surgically removed, to make it say the opposite. All the more care is needed, given the efforts by Russian state propagandists to distort Arakhamia’s meaning.
In March this year, Benjamin and Davies cited a third source – Oleksiy Arestovich, Zelensky’s former spokesman – in support of the claim that Putin’s Istanbul deal had been negotiated and “already had the champagne corks popping in Kyiv”. Again a politician, and one whose words need to be treated with special care. Readers should read his interview themselves.
But to pretend that Arestovich’s account shows that the western powers wrecked the peace talks is deceitful. Asked if Johnson twisted Zelensky’s arm, Arestovich says:
I don’t know exactly if that is true or false. He came to Kiev but nobody knows what they spoke about except, I think, Zelensky and Boris Johnson himself. I think it was the second of April, and I was in Bucha the next day. The president got in [to Bucha] one day later. […]
Arestovich here underlined his point that: “The president was shocked about Bucha. All of us were shocked about Bucha. […] Zelensky completely changed face when he came into Bucha and saw what happened.”
My conclusion is not that news of the Bucha massacre alone changed Zelensky’s mind. My best guess is that Bucha, combined with the other brutal Russian offensive operations in progress – especially the attack on Mariupol – focused the minds of Zelensky and others on the issue of security guarantees outside of NATO. And they could not see clearly what these were.
Despite the importance attached to Bucha by Bennett, Arakhamia and Arestovich, none of the “campists” mention it – except for that one dismissive reference by Marcetic (see above). They live in a fantasy world where Russian imperialism is absent, and its crimes of no consequence.
And that is not really a problem about Ukraine, but about the deep political malaise of a section of the western “left”. There is no path to real international solidarity and effective anti-imperialism through this fantasy world. And no path to peace either. SP, 8 April 2024.
“Adios, America! Now it’s only this way (tacos). End of story.”
This ultra-patriotic gem was just beamed to me by my fellow Petersburg psychogeographer V., who found it forlornly pasted up in the former “party zone” on Dumskaya and Lomonosov streets in downtown Petersburg, a quarter which was thoroughly purged last year by the local powers that be for no good reason.
A quick scan of the QR code leads to the now-equally shuttered website El-Chapo.rf. According to the restaurant review site Restoclub, El Chapo is “closed indefinitely.” But what it must have been back in its heyday, during the first year of Russia’s glorious war against fascist Ukraine and its Western puppet masters!
Dance bar with Mexican cuisine on Lomonosov Street. El Chapo serves Mexican cuisine: quesadillas with oyster mushrooms, burritos with shredded beef and shrimp in coconut. To try the spicy chimichanga tortillas with meat, you have to sign a special contract. Here they mix cocktails based on tequila, rum and house-made tinctures. At the bar you can have your photo taken with local star Frida the Pig. El Chapo hosts DJ sets and parties, and plays Mexican rap, funk, and sometimes disco.
The once lively (and, in the early 2000s, avowedly ethnically and internationally tolerant) Dumskaya bar district is indeed now a ghost town, as witnessed by another snapshot which V. sent to me. ||| TRR
After breathing a sigh of relief, this was the first question that popped in my head:
Who are the 112 U.S. representatives who thought it was a great idea to unilaterally disarm Ukraine, an ally that is fighting for its survival against a U.S. adversary?
The list was published almost immediately.
My reflection is not about these particular people in particular, but the fact that in Washington, and in capitals across Europe, a hefty number of our democratically elected representatives are brazenly siding with Russia, a totalitarian state which has the aim of not only weakening our democracies but bringing defeat to our entire system and the international rules based system. They are siding with the destruction of a sovereign state, Ukraine, and the occupation of its territory and citizens.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is in the company of Matteo Salvini (head of the League), Giuseppe Conte (former Italian PM), and so many other European politicians who may be motivated to side with Russia for a variety of reasons. It speaks to the penetration of Russian capture in some cases, or industrial and commercial interests influencing our political base. Since Russia has no ideology at the present time, I’m assuming they agree with the neo-realist worldview which would see large states eat up smaller ones by force simply because they can, throwing out the entire concept of state sovereignty.
If they have been captured and are working for a foreign adversary, there is no indication that any of them (at least in Italy) are under investigation. The only way we can rid our system of elected representatives working openly in the interests of an adversary to the detriment of our national interests is to vote them out. In Italy, that isn’t possible because even if a head of a party loses an election, he/she can still remain in their place and continue working in the interests of Russia: see Salvini and Conte.
This is why I am overjoyed that the House has belatedly passed the aid to Ukraine bill, but unspeakably frustrated with our inability to rid ourselves of people who are ready to throw our security, and Ukraine, under the bus.
Dmitri Medvedev meltdown: He’s hoping for a civil war in the U.S.
No one doubted that American lawmakers would approve “aid” to a gang of neo-Nazis. It was a vote by the joyous bastards of the state:
a) in favour of continuing the civil war of the divided people of our formerly united country;
b) for maximising the number of victims of this war.
We will win, of course, despite the 61 billion bloody dollars that will mostly go down the throats of their insatiable military-industrial complex. Strength and Truth are behind us.
But in view of this Russophobic decision, I cannot but wish with all sincerity that the United States would plunge into a new civil war as soon as possible. Which, I hope, will be cardinally different from war of the North and the South in XIX century and will be conducted with application of planes, tanks, artillery, MLRS, all kinds of missiles and other weapons. And which will finally lead to the ignominious collapse of the vile evil empire of the XXI century – the United States of America
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev became the first Russian to get the brand new iPhone 4, which are to go on sale on Thursday.
The Russian leader received the smarthphone [sic] as a present from Apple CEO Steve Jobs during his visit to the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, California.
At 9.3 mm the iPhone 4 is 25 percent thinner than its predecessors and the thinnest smartphone on the market. The gizmo also boasts a state of the art battery, with seven hours of talk time and 300 hours of standby.
According to the Russian mobile operator Beeline, the brand new device may appear on the Russian market no earlier than September.
During his visit to the Silicon Valley the Russian leader also visited the U.S. office of the Russian search engine Yandex.
The Yandex Labs center, based in Paolo Alto, California, is involved in scientific projects concerning mainly the optimization of online search technologies and other advanced research activities.
The president was accompanied by Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh and the chief technology officer of the Silicon Valley-based Yandex Labs, Arkady Borkovsky.
Dark Matter contained a re-recorded version of his Emmy award-winning song ‘It’s a Jungle Out There’, which was used as the theme song for the television series Monk. The album tells countless humorous tales. However, one of its most memorable cuts is the track ‘Putin’, which sees Newman sarcastically attack the Russian president.
The song pokes fun at Putin’s efforts to appear macho, with Newman singing, “And when he takes his shirt off/ He drives the ladies crazy/ When he takes his shirt off/ Makes me wanna be a lady.” A chorus of ‘Putin Girls’ chime in to sing, “Putin if you put it/ Will you put it next to me?”
To accompany the scathing lyrics, Newman uses chaotic instrumentation that sounds like the perfect theme for a cartoon villain. The musician explained that he wrote the song when “all those pictures were appearing of him with his shirt off, and I couldn’t understand why. What did he want?”
He continued: “I think it was just personal vanity of some kind, like he wanted to be Tom Cruise. It wasn’t enough to be the richest and most powerful. He wanted to be the most handsome and a superhero, throwing young people around and wrestling.”
Newman claims that he originally wrote a much harsher version but had to tone down the insults. In 2018, the song won the singer his seventh Grammy, this time for the relatively obscure category of Best Arrangement, Instrumentals and Vocals.
Source: Aimee Ferrier, “Remembering Randy Newman’s satirical warning about Vladimir Putin,” Far Out, 14 October 2022
“RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA HAS MADE ITS WAY into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” That acknowledgement from Michael McCaul, Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was echoed a few days later by Michael Turner, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee. “It is absolutely true, we see, directly coming from Russia, attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.” Among the falsehoods that GOP members of Congress are repeating is the notion that the Ukraine war is actually a battle between NATO and Russia. “Of course it is not,” Turner told CNN. “To the extent that this propaganda takes hold, it makes it more difficult for us to really see this as an authoritarian versus democracy battle.”
What makes it even more difficult to see reality plainly is the presence in the GOP of dunderheads like Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who gushed to an Alabama radio show that “Putin is on top of his game,” while scorning U.S. media accounts of Russian behavior. “The propaganda media machine over here, they sell anything they possibly can to go after Russia.” Tuberville may be the dimmest Putin booster on the Hill, but he is hardly lonely.
It has been two months since the Senate passed, in a 70–29 vote (including 22 Republican yes votes), a $95 billion foreign aid bill that included $60 billion for Ukraine. The Republican-controlled House, by contrast, has been paralyzed. Stories leak out that Speaker Mike Johnson, apparently influenced by high-level briefings he’s received since capturing the gavel, has changed his posture and wants to approve the aid. But Johnson leads, or is at least is the titular congressional chief, of a party that contains a passionate “Putinwing,” and so he dithers. This week, Volodomyr Zelensky has warned that Ukraine will lose the war if the aid is not approved. Yet Johnson is heading not to Kyiv but to Mar-a-Lago.
Pause on that for a moment. The Republican party is now poised to let a brave, democratic ally be defeated by the power that the last GOP presidential nominee save one called “without question, our number one greatest geopolitical foe.” One member of Congress has sworn to introduce a resolution to vacate the speaker’s chair if Johnson puts aid for Ukraine on the floor. And the entertainment wing of conservatism—most egregiously Tucker Carlson—has gone into full truckling mode toward the ex-KGB colonel in the Kremlin.
It’s worth exploring how the Republican party, the party of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” became the party that now credulously traffics in blatant Russian disinformation while it flirts with betraying an important ally—along with all of its principles.
To some degree, people’s foreign policy inclinations are reflections of their domestic views. During the later years of the Cold War, large numbers of liberals and Democrats were more sympathetic to leftist regimes like Cuba (see Bernie Sanders) and Nicaragua (see Michael Harrington) than were conservatives and Republicans. I wrote a book about liberal softness toward left-wing authoritarianism and, though I haven’t yet read it, I gather that Jacob Heilbrunn’s new book does some similar spelunking about conservatives’ tolerance for right-wing dictators. Certainly some conservatives were more inclined than any liberal to go easy on South Africa because it was perceived to be a Cold War ally. On the other hand, Republican administrations did push allies to clean up their act on corruption, democratic elections, and other matters where they could (as for example in El Salvador).
Trump’s particular preferences and ego needs play a starring role in the GOP’s devolution. Cast your minds back to 2016 and the revelation that the Russians had hacked the Democratic National Committee. To rebut this damaging development, Fox News conjurers got busy inventing a tale about CrowdStrike, the company that documented the hack, alleging that the servers had been mysteriously moved to Ukraine so that the FBI could not examine them. In his infamous phone call with Zelensky, Trump fished out this debunked nugget and asked Ukraine’s president, who was then already fighting Russia in the Donbas, to do him a favor before he released the weapons Congress had approved:
I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike. . . . I guess you have one of your wealthy people. . . . The server, they say, Ukraine has it. I would like to have the attorney general call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it.
This was bonkers. As the Mueller report made clear, the FBI did get all the data regarding the DNC hack. There was never a shred of evidence that the servers were moved to Ukraine, and in any case physical control of the servers was unnecessary. But what was Zelensky supposed to say? He promised to look into it just as a courtier to a mad king will say, “Yes, your majesty, we will look into why your slippers are turning into marshmallows when the sun goes down.”
As Fiona Hill told me, Tom Bossert, Trump’s first homeland security advisor, tried “a million times” to disabuse Trump of this Ukraine myth, as did CIA Director Gina Haspel, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Chris Krebs, and many others, to no avail. It was, Hill notes, “a too-convenient fiction.”
Because Trump regarded any implication that he had received assistance from Russia as impugning his victory, he latched onto the idea (perhaps whispered by Putin himself in one of their many private conversations) that, yes, there had indeed been foreign interference in the election, but it was Ukraine boosting Hillary Clinton, not Russia aiding Trump. Now, it’s true that Ukraine’s friends reached out to Clinton, but why wouldn’t they? Trump’s campaign manager was Paul Manafort, a paid agent of Viktor Yanukovych, the ousted pro-Putin Ukrainian leader.
Trump nurtured his misplaced grudge for years. Recall that when Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Trump’s initial response was that it was a “genius” move.
I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, “This is genius.” Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine—of Ukraine—Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful. He used the word “independent” and “we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace.” You gotta say that’s pretty savvy.
A non-sociopath would say it was raw aggression of the worst kind. A normal Republican of the pre-Trump mold would have been outraged at the attempted rape of a peaceful, democratic neighbor.
Most Republican officeholders are not sociopaths, but they take their marching orders from one and have adjusted their consciences accordingly. The talking point J.D. Vance and his ilk favor is that they cannot be concerned about Ukraine’s border when our southern border is also being invaded. Of course it’s absurd to compare immigrants looking for work or safety to tanks, bombs, and missiles, but that’s what passes for Republican reasoning these days. In any case, it was revealed to be hollow when Biden and the Democrats offered an extremely strict border bill to sweeten aid for Ukraine, and the GOP turned it down flat.
Russia’s fingerprints are all over the Republicans’ failed attempt to impeach (in all senses of the word) Joe Biden. Their star witness, Alexander Smirnov—who alleged that Hunter and Joe Biden had been paid $5 million in bribes by Burisma—was indicted in February for making false statements. High-ranking Russians appear to be his sources.
Whether the subject is Ukraine, Biden’s so-called corruption, or NATO, Putin seems to have pulled off the most successful foreign influence operation in American history. If Trump were being blackmailed by Putin it’s hard to imagine how he would behave any differently. And though it started with Trump, it has not ended there. Putin now wields more power over the GOP than anyone other than Trump. GOP propagandists indulge fictions that even many Russians can see through: Ukraine is governed by Nazis; Russia is a religious, Christian nation; Russia is fighting “wokeness.”
Republicans are not so much isolationist as pro-authoritarian. They’ve made Hungary’s Viktor Orbán a pinup and they mouth Russian disinformation without shame. Putin must be pinching himself.
Putin recommends reviving ‘Come On, Girls!’ contest, following Uralvagonzavod’s example
Following his visit to the Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk regions, President Vladimir Putin instructed regional heads to explore the initiative.
This isn’t the winner of the Come On, Girls! contest in Nizhny Tagil, but a stock image that Rabota.ru figured was good enough.
The list of the head of state’s mandates includes holding corporate Come On, Girls! contests, as is already being done at Uralvagonzavod in Nizhny Tagil, where Putin met with the event’s winner.
Top officials have until November to submit a report detailing how they have implemented the mandate.
Come On, Girls! was a televised Soviet competition that aired from 1970 to 1987. Members of particular professions competed both for the title of best specialist and in creative contests.
During the same visit to Uralvagonzavod, it was suggested to Putin that excursions by schoolchildren to industrial enterprises be made mandatory. For the time being, authorities are drafting labor education lessons for pupils modeled on the Soviet system.
The trailer to A Shaman’s Tale (Beata Bashkirova & Mikhail Bashkirov, 2024). Thanks to Pavel Sulyandziga for the heads-up
A Shaman’s Tale
A modern-day shaman sets out across Siberia to Moscow on a protest march and is gradually joined by others. How will the Russian authorities react?
Alexander Gabyshev, a shaman from Yakutia in the Russian Far East, has a revelation: God has chosen him to be a crusader, whose role is to exorcise a demon – Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin – from the Kremlin. He’s willing to sacrifice his life to fulfil this task, which will lead to a new and bright future for Russia. Alexander’s walking pilgrimage captures the attention of many people as well as the police. He discusses his ambitious plan with passers-by in remote parts of Siberia and with lorry drivers travelling on the endless roads. His 8,000 km journey offers a mosaic of current pro- and anti-Putin opinions, and highlights the social instability in both the eastern and the western parts of Russia.
Five years ago, in the spring of 2019, Alexander Gabyshev, who calls himself a warrior shaman, set out on foot from Yakutsk to Moscow. When he arrived in the Russian capital, he wanted to perform a ritual to exorcise Vladimir Putin from the Kremlin. Along the way he was joined by kindred spirits, and he held numerous protest rallies.
The shaman’s trek was cut short: Gabyshev was detained on the border of Buryatia and the Irkutsk Region and charged with “calling for extremism.” In October 2021, a court ordered him to undergo compulsory treatment at a special psychiatric hospital.
The Memorial Human Rights Centre placed Gabyshev on its list of political prisoners, and Amnesty International recognized him as a prisoner of conscience. Despite an international campaign in his defense, the shaman remains in a psychiatric hospital.
The documentary film A Shaman’s Tale details Alexander Gabyshev’s plight. It was made by documentary filmmaker Beata Bashkirova (née Bubenets) and her husband, playwright Mikhail Bashkirov, who live in France. Bashkirova joined Alexander Gabyshev on his trek, while Mikhail Bashkirov wrote a play about the shaman. Performances of the play at Moscow’s Theatre.doc were disrupted by Putinists. This was not Bashkirova’s first clash with ultra-patriots: in 2017, screenings of her documentary film Flight of the Bullet, about the soldiers of the Ukrainian Aidar Battalion, fighting in Donbas, were disrupted in the same way.
This conversation with Beata Bashkirova for the Radio Svoboda programme “Cultural Diary” was recorded after the film’s premiere at the One World International Film Festival in Prague.
Beata, how did you meet the shaman Gabyshev?
I first heard about the shaman in March 2019, when he had just set off on his journey. At that time he was not yet known throughout Russia, but he was beginning to gain popularity in Yakutia and in the Amur Region. He initially gained popularity thanks to truckers: they shot videos [of him] and posted them on their own network, then on YouTube. When I went to Yakutia in the spring to look for an idea for a film, my friends sent me videos of the shaman, recommending him as my future protagonist. But I decided to film him only in June. That was when Vlad Ketkovich, an independent documentary film producer, contacted me. He had made many political films and not only offered to be my producer, but also contributed his own money to my project. We dreamed of making a road movie about the shaman, of filming for two years on the roads of Russia. It was a beautiful idea, which unfortunately didn’t come to pass, because it ended up being film about the political crackdown. In recent years, nearly all films from Russia are about that.
Did you become friends with the shaman?
Yes, we developed a very good relationship. When we were filming in Yakutsk, we were probably among the people closest to him.
He didn’t mind you filming?
He welcomed us filming: he wanted more people and different people to talk about him, to spread his ideas. He was accompanied by a lot of bloggers, and journalists were heavily filming him. Although in the beginning he didn’t let us in so easily. The distrust was not on his part, but on the part of his entourage. They were wary of us, but later everything was fine.
Gabyshev and his squad marching toward Moscow
The shaman is certainly a charming man. But you can’t say that about some of the people in his entourage, judging by your film. Colourful personalities, I guess, always attract strange people, to put it mildly.
Yes, he had a very motley entourage, and he realised it himself. He gave everyone who joined him fabulous nicknames. He called his first two companions Raven and Angel. One was a good, happy man of the new world (the shaman divided the world into the new world and the old world), while other was a man of the old world, a dark character; he had been in prison before, he was this maverick. Raven had many conflicts with other members of the squad. The shaman told me often that yes, there are very different people walking with me, but this is Russia, you have to accept them as they are. Yes, they are different, everyone has their own peculiarities, not all of them are the nicest people in the world, but at the same time they are not the most terrible evil, which they all oppose.
In the film, Gabyshev tries to explain to a Japanese journalist how he became a shaman. Why did he decide to go to Moscow and exorcise the demon Putin?
The poster for the film “A Shaman’s Tale”
He studied at university and served in the army: he had an ordinary life. Then he got married, but his wife was quite ill and died, and that was a huge blow to him. For some time he went to live in the woods: he lived there for several years. Naturally, he knew who Putin was, but he was not interested in politics. As he says, at some point he heard the voice of God telling him that Putin was a demon and you should go and exorcise him from the Kremlin. It was a very clear thought, a realisation that this was his mission. It didn’t come to him in 2019, when he set out, but much earlier. He started preparing years before his trek, but he prepared in secret; he didn’t tell anyone that he had this mission. He practised martial arts — not to fight, but for the spiritual benefits.
And for quite a long time he travelled unhindered, and the authorities didn’t immediately realise what was happening?
Yes, in fact, not many people took it seriously at first: everyone thought it was a joke. But then people started joining him. A few months later, when we were walking with him, there were thirty people with him, and new people were joining every day. His squad grew quite quickly. Two theories as to why he was stopped. The first is that after a few months there would have been hundreds of people walking with him, and that would have been a political threat. But the second theory is that the authorities were afraid of his mystical power. The closer he got to Moscow, the worse things went for Putin, the more protests kicked off. The protests in Belarus began around the same time. Putin was allegedly having health problems — again this is a matter of rumor. So, perhaps, the shaman has now been exiled to the farthest point from Moscow, not even to Yakutsk, but even farther away. That is, as he got closer to Moscow, the Russian authorities lost their grip on things.
Yes, they say there is a lot of superstition in the Kremlin. And in your film, the lawyer Pryanishnikov also explains that the authorities were afraid of the shaman’s mystical power.
That the authorities are superstitious is, of course, a hypothesis — Putin doesn’t perform rituals for us, and there are a lot of myths around this. It is known that one of his closest associates, Shoigu, is a Tuvan and he practices shamanism. So it is quite possible. My Yakutian acquaintances often said that an acquaintance of their acquaintance performed rituals for Putin himself. But, of course, this is all very secret and impossible to prove. I would not claim that Putin performs shamanistic rituals.
Did you have the feeling that Gabyshev actually has supernatural powers?
The first time was in 2020. When the year 2020 came, the shaman kept saying: guys, new times have come, everything will be different now, this year the worldview of all people on the planet will change. And in 2020 there was a pandemic, and mankind did indeed transit into another reality. His words proved prophetic.
Filmmaker Beata Bashkirova
People who met Rasputin spoke of his incredible magnetism. They say the same thing about many prophets and magicians. Did you feel something similar when you conversed with Gabyshev?
He is very kind and very open, and there were people in his entourage who believed in his mystical power. I am a rather skeptical person in this sense, but still I noticed a good energy emanating from him.
Did people in his entourage regard him as a prophet, as a saint?
Yes, of course, there were people in his entourage who believed primarily in his mystical power. The Moscow crowd, the opposition-minded liberal intelligentsia, basically sympathised with him, but regarded him ironically. If we’re not talking about Moscow, but about the rest of Russia, I had impression that people believed in his mystical power.
When you presented the film in Prague, you compared Gabyshev with Navalny. This is a quite unusual comparison: in Moscow, few people would agree that these people are cut from the same cloth. Why do you think it is possible to put their names in the same sentence?
At the time, it had been forty days since Navalny’s death. Navalny in his last years seemed like a loner who was fighting the system. Our protagonist is also a loner who fights the system. In this way, I think, they are similar.
Were you present at the moment when his journey to Moscow was finally thwarted?
That was 19 September, and I was not with him on that day. Eyewitnesses say it happened at night, and very quickly. For the first few days nobody knew where he was; there were various rumours. Then it transpired that he was in Yakutsk. We met almost immediately, and he was in pretty good spirits despite what had happened.
Why did they decide to permanently isolate him?
He was going to set out again in the spring. Members of his squad had come to see him. I don’t know whether that’s why they decided to shut him down permanently.
Maybe it was the New York Times article, the attention from the West?
Maybe, but that was in September. The first time he was detained, in the spring of 2020, he was taken away from his home, but then he was released. They finally decided to close him down in early 2021.
The Shaman in the Theatre.doc production of A Shaman’s Tale
In the film, you show excerpts from a performance about the shaman at Theatre.doc. Did your husband direct this production based on his own play?
Yes, my husband wrote the play, and he and I staged it together. It was an experimental work. We decided to make a puppet show, a fairy tale, because the shaman conceived his own story as a fairy tale: he gave fairy tale names to all the folks who accompanied him, and he gave Putin a fairy tale name. That was the reason for our fairy-tale production, which did not last long, because on opening day pro-Kremlin provocateurs came and tried to disrupt it. Every time [the play was performed], they put obstacles in the way: they would come in a big group, stage a performance in front of the theatre, call the police, and start shouting from the auditorium during the performance. The owner of the premises where Theatre.doc was located became afraid that he would face consequences nd broke his lease with the theatre. It became apparent that we wouldn’t be able to perform the play.
Beata, when did you leave Russia?
We left in late March 2022.
And it was only in France that you decided to edit the film?
The film had been in post-production while we were still in Russia. The shaman predicted that he had to reach Putin in 2021, because otherwise there would be a catastrophe not only for Russia but for the whole world. Principal filming wrapped in early 2020, but we realised we had to wait. We were editing the film and discussing it with the producers. The producers suggested releasing the film in 2020, when it became clear that the shaman would not be allowed to go [to Moscow], but we understood that the story was not finished: the drama had already been defined by the shaman himself, and we would have to wait until 2022. The events that followed affected how I saw the story; I started to look at it differently, if we’re talking about the mystical aspects. The shaman had been right: he was talking about war. He was saying that there would be a physical war, not a spiritual war, if he wasn’t allowed to reach Moscow. It’s amazing that somehow he knew all the dates.
Did he have a premonition there would be a war in 2022?
He spoke about the fact that mankind, Russia had two ways to evolve. The first way was the good way, the happy way. If he were allowed to reach the Kremlin, Putin would simply resign peacefully, the regime in Russia would change, and then people would move to a new level. If they didn’t let him [reach the Kremlin], a dark path would ensue, the path of warriors, and that meant war. He didn’t say that there would be a war between Russia and Ukraine. He said that there would be a war and only by military means would it be possible to overthrow Putin.
He’s been transferred from one hospital to another several times. What is happening to him now?
He is in a psycho-neurological clinic in the Maritime Territory (Primorsky Krai). Since this system has several levels, the lawyer is trying to ensure he is transferred to Yakutsk, where he can be released through the court. A legal fight is now underway that is aimed at achieving his release step by step.
At first they held him in a high-security facility and tried to “treat” him with haloperidol?
At the very beginning, in Yakutsk, he was given harsh drugs that did have a negative effect on him. Things in the Maritime Territory are now easier: they give him medication, but it’s not so heavy.
You wrote that he knew about the film’s premiere in Prague and conveyed his greetings to the audience. Are you able to correspond with him?
Yes, we communicate through intermediaries; the lawyer Pryanishnikov has the most access to him. His friends talk to him on the telephone from time to time: he is able to call once a week.
What’s his condition? Haloperidol and other serious drugs can be very harmful to a person’s health.
Fortunately, they are not injecting him with these drugs now. He always tries to be in a cheerful mood. You can write him a letter or send him a card. He is very much encouraged by the thought that people remember him. He is, of course, happy that the film has come out because it is a continuation of the message he preached. His emotional state is also very much affected by whether his mission can be completed.
For several years he had many supporters who were will to march with him to Moscow. Did this circle disperse or has the core group remained intact?
We can say that the core has been preserved. For example, Viktor Yegorov (aka Father Frost), who makes videos (you can watch them on YouTube), is constantly in touch with him. Other Yakutian friends of his also continue to support him. There were those who walked with him, and those he met on the road, but there was also the rest of Russia, which did not walk with him, but followed him via YouTube. People still even ask me about him, and so I feel like there are a lot of people who remember him and support him.
“Father Frost from the Shaman’s Squad Appeals to Vladimir Putin,” 25 September 2019 (in Russian; no subtitles)
Did you ever suspect that he might be mentally unwell?
No, never. He’s a fairly well-educated man, he has a broad outlook, and he is quite self-deprecating. I’m not a psychiatrist, but I haven’t detected any mental abnormalities in him. I much more often encounter people on the streets who are crazier looking than he is.
It is quite difficult to make films on Russian topics nowadays: Russian directors are viewed with suspicion in Europe because they are seen as representatives of an aggressor state. Was it complicated for you to make this film?
Yes, it was indeed difficult to make the film because of the tendency towards boycotting. I think that this boycott helps Russian propaganda first of all, because the voices of independent, opposition filmmakers are not heard, but the voices of the propagandists, who cannot be influenced by this boycott, are heard. Consequently, propaganda wins out in the information sphere. The boycott of Russian culture works in favour of Russian propaganda, it seems to me.
Will Russian viewers be able to see your film?
We’re in the festivals stage of screening now. The film will later be shown on Current Time, but it’s hard to say when yet. Current Time broadcasts to a Russophone audience, and so one will be able to watch the film on the internet in Russia.
First broadcast in 1981, this Hidden Treasure play by Dennis Potter stars Denholm Elliott as Harris and Ian Ogilvy as James. It has not been heard for over 40 years.
In a dingy flat in Moscow, he sits alone — a traitor to his family, his friends, his colleagues. Then the international press descend upon him and he gives his first interview — an interview which brings forth terrible, haunting memories.
Adapted for radio and directed by Derek Hoddinott A BBC World Service Drama production
With thanks to Keith Wickham, Dr Steve Arnold, Ruby Churchill, Louisa Britton, Alison Hindell, Matthew Dodd, Claire Coss, Carl Davies, Helen Toland, Richard Culver, Andrew Jupp, James Peak, BBC Archives and the Radio Circle.
On Sunday, Representative Michael R. Turner (R-OH), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said it is “absolutely true” that Republican members of Congress are parroting Russian propaganda. “We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor,” he said on CNN’s State of the Union.
Turner was being questioned about an interview in which Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Russia specialist Julia Ioffe that “Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” McCaul blamed right-wing media. When asked which Republicans he was talking about, McCaul answered that it is “obvious.”
Catherine Belton and Joseph Menn reviewed more than 100 internal Kremlin documents from 2022 and 2023 obtained by a European intelligence service and reported in the Washington Post today that the Russian government is running “an ongoing campaign that seeks to influence congressional and other political debates to stoke anti-Ukraine sentiment.” Kremlin-backed trolls write fake “news articles, social media posts and comments that promote American isolationism, stir fear over the United States’ border security and attempt to amplify U.S. economic and racial tensions” while claiming that “Biden’s policies are leading the U.S. toward collapse.”
Aaron Blake pointed out in the Washington Post that Republicans are increasingly warning that Russian propaganda has fouled their party. Blake notes that Russia specialist Fiona Hill publicly told Republicans during the 2019 impeachment inquiry into Trump that they were repeating “politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests,” but Republicans angrily objected.
Now Senators Mitt Romney (R-UT), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and John Cornyn (R-TX) and a top aide to Senator Todd Young (R-IN), as well as former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and even Trump’s vice president Mike Pence, have warned about the party’s ties to Russia. Former Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) has said the Republican Party now has “a Putin wing.”
Trump has hinted that he has a plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Yesterday, Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey, and Michael Birnbaum reported in the Washington Post on the details of that plan: he would accept Russian annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and the Donbas region. He refuses to say how he would negotiate with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, who has been adamant that Ukraine will not give up its territory to an invader, or Russia president Vladmir Putin, who has claimed all of Ukraine, but after meeting with Trump last month, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán said Trump told him he would accomplish “peace” by cutting off funds to Ukraine.
Trump’s team said Orbán’s comment was false, but it is worth noting that this plan echoes the one acknowledged by Trump’s 2016 campaign director Paul Manafort as the goal of Russian aid to Trump’s campaign.
Fiona Hill told the Washington Post reporters that Trump’s team “is thinking…that this is just a Ukraine-Russia thing…rather than one about the whole future of European security and the world order.”
Trump’s MAGA loyalists in the House of Representatives have held up funding for Ukraine for six months. Although a national security supplemental bill that would fund Ukraine has passed the Senate and would pass the House if it were brought to the floor, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) refuses to bring it to the floor. The House returns to work tomorrow after a two-week recess but is so backed up on work that Johnson is not expected to bring up the Ukraine measure this week.
Clint Watts, the head of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, told the Washington Post’s Belton and Menn: “The impact of the Russian program over the last decade…is seen in the U.S. congressional debate over Ukraine aid…. They have had an impact in a strategic aggregate way.”
